A language model defines probable word succession probabilities: For example “now a daze” and “nowadays” are pronounced exactly the same, but because of context we know that “Now a daze I have a smartphone” is far less likely than “Nowadays I have a smartphone”. To model such contextual information, speech recognition systems usually use an n-gram that contains information of how likely a specific word is, given the context of the sentence. Continue Reading →

Thanks to everyone who participated in the poll last week about what speech recognition project you’d most like to see.
The week is over, and Dictation has emerged as a clear winner! Continue Reading →

A little while ago, I mentioned that I’ll be giving a talk about the current state of open source speech recognition at this years Akademy.
As part of that talk, I want to show off a tech-demo of a moonshot use case of open source speech recognition to not only demonstrate what is already possible, but also show off the limits of the current state of the art. Continue Reading →

With the rising popularity of speech recognition in cars and mobile devices it’s not hard to see that we’re on the cusp of making speech recognition a first-class input method across our devices.
However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that what we’re seeing in our smart phones or laptops today is merely the beginning. I am convinced that we will see much more interesting applications of speech recognition technologies in the future.

So today, I wanted to ask: What application of speech recognition technology are you looking forward to the most? Continue Reading →

I’ve been quietly fixing various bugs and annoyances since the release of Simon 0.4.0 and I think this warrants a small maintenance release before diving into new features for the next major Simon version.

So without much ado, I’d like to announce Simon 0.4.1 coming to a mirror near you on 24th of June, 2013.

EDIT: The earlier version of this post erroneously said “July” instead of “June”. The release of Simon 0.4.1 is indeed planned for next Monday, 24th of June, 2013.

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be once again be attending this years Akademy!

In Bilbao, I’ll be talking about the current status of open source speech recognition systems, why they’re apparently all still “stuck” in the year 2000 and what we can do to change that. You can find more about my talk on the official schedule.